...[I]mperialism is now seen by global elites as altogether evil, despite
empires’ having offered the most benign form of order for thousands of
years, keeping the anarchy of ethnic, tribal, and sectarian war bands to
a reasonable minimum. Compared with imperialism, democracy is a new and
uncertain phenomenon. Even the two most estimable democracies in modern
history, the United States and Great Britain, were empires for long
periods. “As both a dream and a fact the American Empire was born before
the United States,” writes the mid-20th-century historian of westward
expansion Bernard DeVoto. Following their initial settlement, and before
their incorporation as states, the western territories were nothing
less than imperial possessions of Washington, D.C. No surprise there:
imperialism confers a loose and accepted form of sovereignty, occupying a
middle ground between anarchy and full state control.

Ancient empires such as Rome, Achaemenid Persia, Mauryan India, and
Han China may have been cruel beyond measure, but they were less cruel
and delivered more predictability for the average person than did
anything beyond their borders. Who says imperialism is necessarily
reactionary? Athens, Rome, Venice, and Great Britain were the most
enlightened regimes of their day. True, imperialism has often been
driven by the pursuit of riches, but that pursuit has in many cases
resulted in a hard-earned cosmopolitanism. The early modern empires of
Hapsburg Austria and Ottoman Turkey were well known for their relative
tolerance and protection of minorities, including the Jews. Precisely
because the Hapsburg imperialists governed a mélange of ethnic and
religious groups stretching from the edge of the Swiss Alps to central
Romania, and from the Polish Carpathians to the Adriatic Sea, they
abjured ethnic nationalism and sought a universalism almost postmodern
in its design. What followed the Hapsburgs were mono-ethnic states and
quasi-democracies that persecuted minorities and helped ease the path of
Nazism.

All of these empires delivered more peace and stability than the
United Nations ever has or probably ever could. Consider, too, the
American example. The humanitarian interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo,
and the absence of such interventions in Rwanda and Syria, show American
imperialism in action, and in abeyance....